Ready-to-eat food items, especially food bars, or snack bars as they may be appropriately termed, are known and have been available for some time. Some snack bars generally contain one or more grains, nuts, dried fruit, sweeteners and other ingredients. These ingredients are typically mixed with a binder such as a sugar syrup or shortening and compressed into bars or slabs which may be later cut to a desired size. Depending on the snack bar's composition, it may be mixed, formed, and/or baked prior to packaging and sale.
Consumers who purchase and eat these snack bars may be health conscious and thus careful about what they eat. For such consumers, these food bars, or snack bars, would be even more desirable if they contained reduced-fat levels. However, in such food bars,, fat is typically added in the preparation of the bar. Fat may be added as a binding agent and/or in the form of an oil, which acts to keep the food bar tender and imports other desirable organoleptic properties, such as flavor and mouthfeel. When the oil is not added, or is replaced with water and sugar syrup, the resulting food bar has a poor texture in that it is excessively hard and brittle, and thus is typically not as acceptable to consumers. In the present invention, however, when the water-soluble dietary fiber composition of the present invention is added to food items, particularly food bars, as a replacement for such oils, it has been surprisingly found that a reduced-fat, ready-to-eat food item can be prepared with few, if any, of these undesirable effects.